One of the first architectural decisions that Bud and I made for the Macintosh system software in the spring of 1981 was that we were only going to try to run one application at a time. We barely had enough RAM or screen space to do even that, and we thought that we'd benefit from the resultant simplifications. Besides, multi-tasking was supposed to be Lisa's forte, and we didn't want to usurp all of the reasons for buying a Lisa.

Bud Tribble was usually on an even keel, but one afternoon in the fall of 1981 he came into my office, unusually excited. "You know, I've been thinking about it. Even if we can only run one major application at a time, there's no reason that we can't also have some little miniature applications running in their own windows at the same time."

That sounded intriguing to me. "What kind of little programs? How are they different?", I wondered.

Bud smiled. "You'd want tiny apps that were good at a specific, limited function that complements the main application. Like a little calculator, for example, that looked like a real calculator. Or maybe an alarm clock, or a notepad for jotting down text. Since the entire screen is supposed to be a metaphorical desktop, the little programs are desk ornaments, adorning the desktop with useful features."

"But where do we draw the line?", I asked. "What are the differences between an ornament and a real application?"

"Well, ornaments have to fit into the world of the main application", Bud responded, "but not the other way around. The main application owns the menu bar, for example, but maybe the ornaments can have a menu when they're active. The main application would still run its event loop, but it would occasionally pass events to the little guys. And of course you can cut and paste between them."

That sounded good to me, but we had plenty of other stuff to work on first. Bud left Apple in December 1981 to return to medical school, but I explained his concept to new team members and considered them to be part of our plan. Chris Espinosa liked the idea when we explained it to him, and he worked on a visualization of the calculator as part of learning to program with QuickDraw, culminating in a calculator construction set (see Calculator Construction Set). Eventually, after getting the initial implementations of the window, menu and event managers going, by May 1982 we had enough of the rudiments done to give desk ornaments a try.

The nascent Mac operating system already had an implementation of loadable device drivers, where installable code could be loaded from disk to manage optional peripherals. I decided to cast desk ornaments as a special kind of driver, adding a few extra calls so they could maintain a window on the screen, receive events from the host application, and occasionally get some processing time to accomplish something. Applications were required to make a system call periodically to yield some time for ornaments to run, and had to occasionally pass events to them and follow a few other conventions for co-existing. The very first desk ornament was a boring one, called "TestOrn", that displayed a rectangular window with an incrementing counter, showing that it was capable of doing background processing, even when it wasn't the top-most window. It wasn't very impressive, but it became the template from which all the others sprung.

In the fall of 1982, the first pass of the User Interface Toolbox was completed, so I had time to work more on ornaments, which by this time were renamed "desk accessories" by the pubs group who thought that the term "ornament" was too ornamental. I wrote a simple clock, and got the calculator going, modeled after Steve Jobs' design from the calculator construction set. The most interesting one that I wrote in that spurt was a desktop pattern editor, which was a sort of miniature icon editor that let you edit an 8 by 8 pixel pattern by clicking to toggle the dots on and off. When you made a pattern that you liked, you could make it the desktop pattern, filling the background of the screen with your new creation instead of the standard gray.

Within a couple of months, other people wanted to take a crack at writing desk accessories. Someone asked me if they could write one in Pascal, which wasn't easy because you had to pass parameters to the underlying driver in registers, which the Pascal compiler couldn't manipulate directly. I realized that you could write a little bit of standard glue code in assembly language to do the dirty work, and have most of your desk accessory written in Pascal. I wrote a number puzzle in Pascal as a test case, to prove that it could be done (see The Puzzle).

But once again I had to get back to other things and the desk accessories languished. But by the spring of 1983, the ROM was beginning to stabilize, and we realized that we had to get serious about the desk accessories that would ship with the initial system. Jerome assigned Donn Denman, who was taking a hiatus from working on Basic to help us finish the system, to help with desk accessories. Donn and I collaborated on finishing the calculator, with Donn doing the back-end that interfaced with the floating point routines. Donn was also responsible for the alarm clock and notepad.

Now that we had cut and paste working, I realized that it would be useful to have a desk accessory that could hold commonly used snippets of text and graphics, so they could be pasted into any application. I wrote a desk accessory called the "Gallery" that allowed you to manage a set of clippings using cut and paste, building it on top of the resource manager so it was easy to implement. Everyone seemed to like the functionality but not the name. I was explaining the situation to Larry Kenyon when he suggested that we call it the "Scrapbook", which was perfect, so the Scrapbook joined our growing armada of useful desk accessories.

The Macintosh's character encoding scheme allocated the upper half of the 8-bit character set to occasionally useful but obscure characters that were not portrayed on the keys, accessed with the option key, that were nearly impossible to remember. Steve Capps conceived of a desk accessory called "Key Caps" (named partially after himself?) that displayed a picture of the keyboard, with the keycaps changing depending on the meta-keys that were pressed, which allowed you to hunt for the special characters visually. He coded it up quickly and it became another great addition.

We needed a way to control various system parameters like the sound volume, or the mouse scaling parameters. We decided that a desk accessory would be perfect for that, since it would be easy to access no matter what application you were in. So the last desk accessory that I worked on before shipping, in November 1983, was the Control Panel. Susan Kare came up with a beautiful, highly graphical design (with no text whatsoever) that I implemented using a separate purgable resource for each section, so they didn't have to be in memory at once. It had a little rabbit and tortoise to represent a range of speeds, and lots of other graphical embellishments; after the Mac was released, one review described it as a crib toy, which I took more or less as a compliment.

The most controversial part of the Control Panel was the desktop pattern editor, which I had rescued from its earlier stand-alone incarnation. Users could select from a couple dozen prefabricated desktop patterns or edit their own in fat bits. It was this latter capability that caused problems, as it was pretty easy to create ugly, abominable patterns.

Bill Atkinson complained to me that it was a mistake to allow users to specify their own desktop patterns, because it was harder to make a nice one than it looked, and led directly to ugly desktops. But I thought that users should be free to do as they pleased, since it was their desktop, and it was easy to revert to one of the built-in patterns. Bill cared most about MacPaint, and didn't want a potentially ugly desktop pattern marring his creation. So he made MacPaint allocate a window that was the size of the screen when it started up, and filled it with the standard 50% gray pattern, making his own desktop covering up the real one, thus protecting the poor users from their rash esthetic blunders, at least within the friendly confines of MacPaint.

More of Bill must have rubbed off on me than I thought! I made a similar argument against user control of the UI colors when the Mac II was introduced. Recall that Color Quickdraw supported only 256 colors initially, and was slow (this was before you sold QuickerDraw, Andy).
To say that some of the color schemes users came up with were eye searing is being kind, really. Many developers also used Color Quickdraw to allow users to adjust colors used in the programs, with similar results.
Ultimately, Bill and I were wrong: it is the user's computer and they should be able to control it. But damn...things sure were hideous for the first couple of years!

from Chris Reed on January 29, 2004 18:06:00

With the return of Steve and OS X (well, really with the dropping of full theme support), Apple has pretty much reverted to not allowing the user the freedom to adjust the interface to their taste.

from Christopher Cabanillas on January 31, 2004 01:14:57

Regarding the customizability of the UI I have to say I like not being able to muck with it. Anytime I have the ability to change my UI I end up doing it all day and never get any real work done. The OS X UI is fine. It doesn't offend my senses, its consistent. I'm happy with it.
Regarding desk ornaments. This is all really amazing. Reading these stories (in the last two days I've read all 71) has just been incredible to see where things I take for granted come from. The rounded corners of windows are one of the things I like so much about the Apple UI (something that Windows still has issues with)
A photographer friend of mine that has always used an Apple (I'm a switcher) was recently lamenting the lack of a Scrapbook in OS X. I had no idea what she was talking about thinking the clipboard was fine for doing what she was on to. I get it now.
And to think you're the folks that created all this great stuff. Leaving this message is like talking to the guys that first discovered fire and the wheel.
Thanks. Tons.

from Susan Etheridge on January 31, 2004 02:52:13

I am Chris' photographer friend. I have been using Apples since I was a little kid, and got my first Mac when I was 12 (LCIII System 7.1). The other day I was telling Chris about the Notepad and the Scrapbook, and he had no clue what I was saying. Those apps were great. I really loved the ability to put a sound in the Scrapbook too. It was so awesome to have all these picts right at your fingertips, instead of having to open an entire file one by one. I created a lot of cool school projects thanks to the Scrapbook.
Now I have been reminded about Puzzle, which I never solved, I loved that little thing too. All those little apps were so much fun and so cute!

from Chris Long on February 04, 2004 06:01:50

I was just reminiscing today about the first time I ever "used" a Mac. I had seen them but never really used them. Then I started falling in love with the ease of use. Reading these articles over the past few days brought back a lot of memories. I even fired up Puzzle and Scrapbook in Classic. What amazing work! Thanks so much for this site.

from Jason Rambo on March 19, 2004 06:53:27

As one that took somewhat slowly to the OS X (probably becasue v10.0 was so rough!), I have to say that there is not much need to miss the humble little scapbook DA.
That this program was left out is part of the beauty of 10. As it regards the scrapbook, the OS 10 Finder is the scrapbook on steroids! Even though the program itself is missing, the features it suppied have been replaced in spades by the features of the new Finder.
The debut of the preview pane and a column-style view allows you to make any folder into a collection of images and sounds. Since the Finders preview pane can utilize QuickTime, your "scrapbook" directory now can display and playback many diffrent file formats, including movies and mp3's.
With the Finder providing direct and simple access to browsing, indexing, searching, QuickTime and text file support services it takes very little effort to create a fully browseable folder of sounds, images and movies saved in a variety of popular file formats. With carefully used text files, you would have it all.*
In the Finder, (even with its flaws) Apple has provided a very flexible and useful file system that accentuates (and sometimes replaces) the features of elegent little programs of the past.
As eluded to in a previous post, it is these little details that have always made the Macintosh interface such a pleasure to use. Great work, past and present.
--
* Well, at least you will if you installed the PrintWindow shareware... or once the ability to print directory listings is returned to the Finder. Guess you never can't get everything you want <:

from Nate Friedman on March 20, 2004 07:22:08

Interestingly, i had this ancient version of the Control Panel manifest itself on my Mac Classic in the 1990's. (the System 6 era) i remember thinking that it looked sort of like the General control panel, but i couldn't get to any of the other panels as the list on the left wasn't there. a simple reinstall of the OS returned the "modern" Control Panel that i knew and loved.
oh how i lament the days when an OS reinstall was simple.

from Louis Lavoie on January 07, 2005 21:14:27

The year : 1983. The occasion : a computer show held in Montreal. Having to use a TRS-80 running CP/M (or MS-DOS, not sure about it), I was shocked as if hit by a thunderbolt when I saw a Lisa, with mouse, windows, menus and all the GUI niceties of the day. Another shock came in the same day when I asked for the price of a Lisa : around 12000 CAN$ !
January 1984 : the 128K Mac is born. At 3000 $, it's expensive but affordable. I bought my first Mac in April and I'm still using and loving Macs after all those years...
As many have said, those DAs were Godsends !

from Damian Vila on January 12, 2005 12:16:18

He, he, he!
Looks like "Desk Ornaments" are called "Widgets" these days. Bud and Andy's legacy is still present in MacOS X.
Anyway I only wanted to say that when I got my first Mac Plus, the very first thing I did was playing with the desktop pattern editor. And coming from the Commodore and Spectrum school (where you had to enter your icons by typing numbers) it was kind of an epiphany. I was able to create an icon with the click of a button!. Somehow I studied Graphic Design because of Desk Ornaments. So, I thank Andy for not paying attention to Bill.
(^_^)

from Leo Bodnar on February 05, 2005 20:59:41

Watch Susan Kare and Jerry Manock talking about human interface aspects of Macintosh in 1984 series of Computer Chronicles. Blast from the past! They are so young!
http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?collection=computerchronicles&collectionid=118

from benbot on April 20, 2005 18:04:44

Again I am so glad the desktop pattern editor survived the release. The first time I used a Mac the two components that caught my attention were the Puzzle and the desktop pattern editor (I was seven). The desktop pattern editor made me feel like MC Escher even though I didn't know who he was at the time.
Thanks for not protecting me from myself, that's the government's job!

from Bill Hartter on March 20, 2006 03:43:00

Control Panel - If I had known what it was I would have been much more generous and flattering with my comment. I feel bad about saying it looked like a crib toy. The development of the Mac sounds like a great adventure. I wish I could have been there.

from yuhong on February 23, 2007 04:38:51

The code that was in MacPaint for creating it's own desktop and filling it with the standard 50% gray pattern, of course, were incompatible with MultiFinder and therefore had to be removed. And when Apple designed the Performa system software (System 7.1P), Apple decided to only allow users to choose from the predefined desktop patterns (which could be edited by editing a resource inside the General Controls control panel). Power users of course complained about that and so with System 7.5 a compromise was defined. Apple decided to supply the predefined desktop patterns and allow users to paste their own picture from a picture editing program.